CHRISTOPHER ECCLESTON
THE NINTH DOCTOR OFFERS YOU THE GIFT OF AIR FROM HIS LUNGS AS CHRISTOPHER ECCLESTON RETURNS TO THE WORLD OF DOCTOR WHO IN A SERIES OF NEW AUDIO ADVENTURES
The Ninth Doctor slips back into that chazza shop jacket.
AN AUDIENCE WITH Christopher Eccleston is rare. And while this writer has enjoyed being in the audience for many of Eccleston’s stage and screen performances, there’s one role in particular that will stay with the actor forever. Which makes it all the more exciting when he grants SFX an extremely rare interview to talk about it.
We are, obviously, referring to Dougal Siepp in The League Of Gentlemen. Nah, not really – it’s Doctor bloody Who. Sixteen years since he led the revival of the BBC’S biggest sci-fi show, Eccleston is once more stepping on board the TARDIS, in a series of adventures that fans never thought would happen.
He’s not one to speak to the press often – unless there’s a project he’s passionate about, and even then it’s on the understanding that it’s about this project only. So it’s fortunate for all concerned that Eccleston has nothing but praise for the team at Big Finish. And who can blame him? They’ve been making Doctor Who audio dramas – and a great many others besides – since 1999. But it’s fair to say they broke the internet, or certainly their own website, when they announced the return of Christopher Eccleston to the role of the Ninth Doctor last year.
BLAST FROM THE PAST
The excitement should come as little surprise. It is, after all, one of those roles that stays with an actor forever – something he didn’t consider when offered the part in 2004.
“I didn’t overthink that,” he offers. “By the time I played the Doctor I had been acting professionally for 20 years. I’d achieved quite a level of recognition with things like Our Friends In The North, Let Him Have It, Jude, Shallow Grave. So I was really used to that public figure aspect of it. Particularly in Britain – you go to other countries, [but] it’s in Britain where, [for] the Doctor, they get really feverish.
“So it wasn’t that much of an adjustment for me really, I was kind of used to it. What was nice about it was, having always acted for adults with Our Friends and Cracker and things like that, was to connect me to a younger audience. That was one of the reasons I went for the role, to make something that did not patronise a younger audience… that appealed, because we know children are far, far more intelligent than adults. So I wanted to act for the more discerning audience.”
These new stories – an initial set of four volumes releasing until February 2022 – expand that reach. Were there any dealbreakers in place for his comeback? “No,” he says flatly. “No. I try not to be prescriptive with writers. I just wanted to have a look at the script to get a general sense of the quality and the quality’s very high. That was all I was concerned about, the quality of the writing.
“I think it’s an immense challenge writing for Doctor Who – you have to be able to deliver the techno speak. I don’t mean acting it, I mean writing it, you have to put in place a central idea. You have to condense that into a very small period of time, be it for audio or television, and you have to drive the narrative along and you have to do all of it with levity.
“There has to be this leap of imagination which somebody has made, for instance, with the Burryman ritual in Edinburgh and yoking that up with the Cybermen. I always find myself just lost in admiration for writers, when they first of all make that leap, and then have to sit down and do the nuts and bolts of technically achieving it.
“I’ve been so humbled, really, by the writers on this. People have decided that I’m a good actor because I work with great writers. It’s all about the writer for me, always has been, they make a good actor. They make you look better than you are.”
Metaphorically slipping that battered leather jacket back on once more has been relatively easy for Eccleston, though it hasn’t really hit home emotionally.
“I’m not a particularly sentimental person. I don’t think actors are, you know? We’re used to being dumped and kicked out and rejected. So I’m very unsentimental. I didn’t really feel
People have decided that I’m a good actor because I work with great writers
anything other than huge gratitude, to be working during the pandemic. I’ve got huge financial pressures on me, like everybody else, and to suddenly be working, being creative, to have somewhere to go, to be communicating with people… I felt very privileged in that. But I was surprised at how quickly my connection with the character re-emerged. I just walked in on Monday, they gave me a script. I started and there it was.
“I remember commenting, I think to [director] Nicholas Briggs, ‘I’m not angsty, I don’t worry about things, I’m all instincts’ and I just picked it up and started doing it. And one of the issues the wonderful Wilfredo has – my main [audio] engineer – is keeping me still. I’m quite a physical actor. We joke that it’s a bit like the Riverdance when I’m in there doing these audio records. Wilfredo would like to put me in a straitjacket, I think. But again, it was there because it was on the page. Actors are blank. We’re wind chimes. We react to what we’re given and let it blow through if we can.”
TIME FOR CHANGE
Fans shouldn’t expect the character of the Ninth Doctor to deviate too much in the initial stories from what he established on screen.
“No, I think there’s a great deal that’s familiar. But I think that goes across the 13 incarnations of the Doctor. He’s enigmatic. He’s charismatic, mercurial, cheeky, brave, iconoclastic, all of those things are in place. We tended to, so far, stay away from the darker aspects of the Ninth Doctor’s backstory, the Time War. He’s travelling alone, which is interesting and freeing, I think, and a good idea for this, for what we’re doing, for me to be free.
“So his emotional connections are formed on the hoof rather than having an ongoing one with a particular assistant. He’s kind of flying blind. He’s questioned about that now and again, and he brushes it off. There are things that are within these stories that he does not want to talk about. And maybe that will be, should the opportunity arise, faced further down the line.”
If the character hasn’t changed too much, what about Eccleston himself – has anything about the way he’s changed in the years since impacted the way he plays the Doctor now?
“Not that I’m aware of,” he says. “I mean, I became a father in 2012 and then 2013. I had a breakdown in 2015/16. So I’m sure that is informing me, but I can’t get a handle on it. To be honest with you, I feel when I’m doing him, I feel exactly as I did 16 years ago. I really do. Perhaps I slightly finesse things, but I tend to work at speed, so I can’t really get outside that. What’s nice about it is that feeling of freedom and play that I had on the set 16 years ago.
“It’s there again, and it’s so necessary, his playful, energetic persona and character. As somebody was saying that Tom Baker said, it’s not really an acting role, and I think there’s something in that – you have to be reactive, you have to be in the moment. There are no constraints to the character. There’s nowhere that he won’t go. That lends itself to the regenerations, it lends itself to the character being endlessly reinterpreted and reinvented by other writers. Russell T Davies writes the Doctor as one Doctor; Steven Moffat writes him as another; Rob Shearman writes him, he’s another. Bit of a boys’ club, though. We need to address that.
“We need some more Cyberwomen, we need female writers. It needs to be addressed, particularly as the Doctor has such a pronounced, for want of a better phrase, feminine side, and such an enthusiastic engagement with the female.”
As Eccleston mentions his time on set, has this project invoked a feeling of nostalgia for his time on the show? “Definitely for the creativity that I experienced with actors like
Richard Wilson, for instance, and Simon Callow and Penelope Wilton, people who turned up and were positive. And the crew that I worked with and what we made together, the crew who were actually on set all day, grafting and making it. Yeah, the excitement of creativity. But I’m not a nostalgic person in that way, you know? It’s a good trait in the Doctor, he forgets instantly and is always in the moment and looking forward. And I’m very like that, particularly post-breakdown. You know, no time to waste.”
It’s fair to say that Doctor Who can often be steeped in nostalgia and sometimes that can be difficult to get away from…
“Yeah,” Eccleston agrees. “And he’s not like that. He’s not like that. That’s the tension. There’s this great love for the traditional, the Daleks and the Cybermen. For an eight-yearold child who has never turned the programme on, it’s great to meet the Daleks. But if he meets a new alien, that alien would become as exciting to them as a Dalek. And I think that’s where the series… it’s got to be very careful about indulging the fanboy – and again, boy thing, he wants to meet new things. We want writers to be given the opportunity to create their own aliens and their own situations.”
When asked if there are other characters, monsters or actors that he’d like to appear, there’s a long pause. “I don’t…” he begins to answer and trails off. “I’d quite like a writer to come up with something that becomes as iconic as the Cybermen. I’d like to meet the Cyberwomen, for instance. I think the Doctor dealing with the Cyberwomen would be interesting. I love the use, for instance, of the Burryman, the Scottish pagan figure. I love all that, I love when new things are introduced and I’d like to be part of establishing a real terrifying creature for the Doctor again.
“So again, it’s not about looking back for me, it’s about looking forward and endlessly reinventing him and his experiences and his world. Freshness. Immediacy.”
Big Finish does have form for taking something and going somewhere completely new with it… “They’ve done that brilliantly with the Cybermen,” he enthuses. “We’ve had this storyline where the Cyberman is not completely cybered up. And the struggle within
I was mobbed at Manchester Airport at one point by a group of schoolchildren
the Cyberman for empathy and humanity, which was brilliantly portrayed yesterday by an actor called Eleanor Lawless, she was doing parts – and Nick Briggs has been doing that kind of Cybermen battling within himself. And also, we had the return of the Brigadier. And there was great emotion between him and the Doctor, which I think the fans will enjoy.
“There’s a real purity, unusual for Englishness in the male relationship, you know, – a male relationship very fondly expressed, quite sentimental in the best way. So the Brigadier is back, Cybermen. So there are things from the canon as well. I think what’s great is if you take something like that but then explore it and expand it. I think then you’re pleasing the new audience and the more traditional audience.”
Another Doctor that later “made peace” with reprising the role was Tom Baker. Does this mean, like him, that a long reign at Big Finish could follow?
“I would hazard a guess that Tom’s never had a problem with playing the Doctor,” Eccleston says. “There’s no obstacle, I would think, between Tom and the Doctor and me and the Doctor, none whatsoever. Because the Doctor is a character. It’s just the positive in your life, at the time that you’re playing it. And when you’re knocking about the streets it’s entirely positive. I think there’s a much bigger audience for Tom. He gave seven years of his life to it, he had millions more fans. He’s an icon of the series. I mean, I did 13 episodes.
“So whether there will be a demand for more Ninth Doctor adventures after this is questionable. It really depends entirely on how they sell – it’s a business. And if as a set they’re well received, and the audience wants more and Big Finish wants me to do more and we can reach an agreement? Then I’m open to it. Yeah, of course. But I can’t be compared to Tom,” he laughs, “in terms of my reach.”
SHARP SHOOTER
Not that we’d be brave enough to square up to Christopher Eccleston, but it would be remiss of SFX not to point out that, to a generation of fans, he can. He brought Doctor Who to a new fanbase who still love him.
“Well, I was the tip of the iceberg,” he bats back. “It was Russell T Davies and his fellow writers that did it. I was the face of it, which I’m grateful for, but it’s always about the writers. I didn’t do it, you know; I was given the bullets and I fired them as well as I could,” he laughs. “But thank you, I appreciate it.”
Well, sir, you were a bloody good shot. But what does being the Doctor mean to him now, in 2021? “I remember walking around the Trafford Centre in 2005, as the series was being broadcast, and a woman came up to me and said, ‘Would you mind saying hello to my son?’ And he walked up to me and I said hello and he burst into tears. And he was 35… I’m joking,” he deadpans.
“I was mobbed at Manchester Airport at one point by a group of schoolchildren. It means the same. I’m a runner, and when I’m not running, I’m out walking. So I’m always being stopped. It’s been going on for 16 years and will go on until the day I die and I’ve always welcomed it. So it means the same. It means the same in terms of my relationship with the people who love it. It’s the same. It’s always there and it’s a positive in my life.”
Doctor Who: The Ninth Doctor Adventures volume one, Ravagers, is available from 13 May at bigfinish.com.